Maintenance of inventory has long been a costly and unfortunate reality of providing products to downstream users such as resellers or customers. In order to have products on hand for use, a supplier must either maintain a large enough inventory of products to meet any use requirements, or be able to very accurately predict use requirements and control supplies at the predicted use rate. A key variable, and one often disputed among buyers and sellers in a supply chain, is who will maintain ownership of a product at different points along the supply chain. The owner of a product bears the obvious cost of the time value of money of the product for as long as the product is owned.
A product supplier sometimes uses offers to maintain ownership of a product until actual time of purchase by an end user as an incentive to convince end sellers to carry the products of the product supplier. Traditionally, this is well known as consignment sales. Consignment sales and highly accurate inventory management, e.g. just-in-time inventory management, are illustrated in the prior art with regard to product distribution in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,912,818, 5,712,989, and 5,671,362. As the economy has moved from a physical product distribution system to a system that includes distribution of information and information products, inventory issues have also changed.
Many products of the modem economy are in fact information or digital data products. Examples include computer applications software, computer data files, analog and digital artistic and informational recordings, and the like. A distinct advantage enjoyed by information products over physical products is that information products can be stored with a minimal physical presence. For instance, the product may be stored on a recording media. However, under traditional models of distribution, information products are copied onto multiple physical media and to subsequently distributed just like any other physical product. Another option for information products is to transfer or download an electronic copy of the information over a network such as a local or wide area network, or the Internet. Such transfers, especially with regard to transfer over the Internet, are typically slower than is convenient because of the relatively low bandwidth of the network. Long transfer time is a negative factor that potentially discourages an end user from using an information product.
One recent product that was introduced on a pay-as-you-use basis was Digital Video Express (DIVX). However, with DIVX a customer had to both buy digital media and pay a license fee each time the content of the media was accessed. This model did not prove commercially viable and new DIVX disks are no longer being sold. A significant problem with DIVX was the need to both buy the media and pay for its use.
ADOBE SYSTEMS, INC. has sold a product entitled “Type on Call.” Type on Call stores many fonts on a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is distributed to users who then must contact and pay ADOBE in order to receive an access code needed to activate one or more of the fonts. This art is disadvantageous because traditional distribution channels must still be used, and because a user must intervene and request an access code rather than having the computer system automatically control access.
The email, network, and Internet service provider AMERICA ONLINE, INC. (AOL) has used various methods to distribute its access software. AOL sometimes directly distributes free media containing its access software, and subsequently charges consumers for access to its connections and network. However, the software itself is not the value provided to the customer. The associated service is the value. The software is provided free of change and “as is.” A downside of the AOL model is that it still requires traditional distribution of media or a relatively slow download. Additionally, because there is no value assigned to the software itself, access to the software is not controlled. The access control is with regard to the associated service.
An improved system would conveniently provide digital data to an end user quickly and with little effort so that the user would be encouraged to use the data. Supply of the data in an improved system would avoid traditional distribution channels as well as physical inventory, thereby reducing costs to all parties. An improved system would also activate automatically in response to access to the digital data and would verify access rights of a user or provide the user with options to activate access rights. Improved systems could also take advantage of unused space in a computer system's nonvolatile memory space to cost effectively record data for subsequent transfer.